Mobile News

Do you check your email and social networks in the morning? Well, it looks like many of us check to find out what happened while you were sleeping. Except for we're not tucking into a newspaper with our coffee, we're scrolling down a Twitter or a Facebook app.

Could this be why news organizations have developed iPhone apps? I ran a search for news applications at the iTunes News Apps for iPhone and stopped counting at 3,240.

Back
in the day when I worked in the ag industry, I learned that farmers are
now so sophisticated when it comes to technology, that they could run
circles around me. Today, they can do it while getting the weather
forecast delivered to them while on the go - through their mobile
phone.

I use NPR News, NYTimes, and BBC News, and am planning to expand my selection. I love convenience and no matter how small laptops become, my iPhone is always with me. Now don't get any ideas, though. Read on to find out why.

Given the increase in the number of people who will have access to high speed, Internet-enabled devices in years to come, news organizations have joined many other companies that are ahead of the game on portability.

The best part on this is that news organizations have a new opportunity to be portable with relevance. In an age when magazines and newspapers are not a daily habit as much any more, news apps incorporate portability with immediacy - push notifications are an example of that.

What can businesses learn from news apps?

A couple of years ago we talked about providing value in exchange for presence on mobile phones. Great brands provide utility, experimentation, design of experience, create a sense of community with customers, and change the model.

How do you get invited in people's phones? As I wrote about two years ago, it comes down to:

1. Publishing great content - this is something you will continue to see everywhere. In fact, it's becoming a big issue for many who launch Web properties and then scramble to stay competitive with content. Imagine how much harder to feed the Web that feeds the phone. It's a completely new way of organizing content.

2. Being real - we got past the empty "hi, how are you, I'm on a train now having a sandwich" kind of real. Put the calories in the purpose and utility of the exchange instead. Education, entertainment and engagement are good starting points, depending on what your brand stands for. We'd like to have more education and utility when it comes to news.

3. Giving the inside scoop - what's behind the scenes, how quickly can we learn about something? This still seems to be faster in social networks, but only because we're not burdened by the bigger scoop for the news organization, which is monetized heavily.

4. Being personal - digital body language tracking and all that, a personal relationship still outweighs any spooky kind of gimmicky stuff like "I noticed you were browsing on that site" and helps tremendously with the "so what" factor.

There's something you're skimming over and that's the ability for AFP, AP and other news agencies to create apps so that the ordinary public can get the information straight from those gathering the agency news which is then redeployed from user to user.

The consequence is that without creating original content those that simply re-print agency material will lose audience to the agencies providing some of the news.

It will encourage original news gathering once again. International news is easy to get, but local news is a little more of a challenge. There are a few web apps that are for the local audiences. I'm thinking of Lematin's web app and romandie.com as to example. They give news and information for an area with an audience of 700,000 people.

These apps are not all free. I'm thinking of AFP, BBC World and Al Jazeera as apps. Each of these is paying, 3.30 swiss francs a piece. It's the same price as a paper but you can access the newest contents until you remove that app from the phone.